The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

A recent report commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which was conducted by the firm Ecotrust, revealed that overfishing for south Atlantic sea bass and red snapper are costing Southeast and Gulf Coast states nearly one hundred million dollars in combined losses resulting from fewer fishing trips for those species.

This series of Carl Mydans photographs depicting wheat farmers in the Tygart Valley of West Virginia struck us as particularly interesting, so we decided to post it as this week's set of featured images. While scouring the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Collection, I came across the first image in the series, which seems to traffic in nostalgic visions of an agrarian landscape filled with small farmers. However, the sequence of photographs below actually shows how West Virginia farmers combined old and new technologies of agricultural production during the Great Depression. More of Mydans's photographs from the Tygart Valley can be found on the Library of Congress website.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South. This week, in a belated celebration of Labor Day, The Bulletin focuses upon the role of organized labor in the 2012 Republican and Democratic National Conventions held in Tampa, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina respectively.

The Huffington Post reported that many of the workers responsible for cleaning up after convention-goers at the Republican National Convention were being paid below minimum wage. Regular employees of Cleanevent USA, the company contracted to clean the convention center in Tampa, were paid the minimum wage of $7.67, but they were also charged a weekly fee of between six and eleven dollars for their uniforms, effectively lowering their wages beneath the minimum.

Organized labor leaders and activists have expressed frustration over the location of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Many leaders decided not to donate money to the convention, while still supporting the president's reelection campaign, because Charlotte is a city without unionized hotels in a state which has the lowest percentage of union members in the nation.

Seven years ago, from August 23 to August 30, 2005, Hurricane Katrina stormed though New Orleans, causing the levees to break, devastating a large part of the Crescent City. To mark the seventh anniversary of this disaster, we offer a bibliography of all Southern Spaces publications discussing Katrina.

Below is a description of the series from the University of Texas Press:

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast and precipitated the flooding of New Orleans. It was a towering catastrophe by any standard. Some 1,800 persons were killed outright. More than a million people were forced to relocate, many for the remainder of their lives. A city of 500,000 was nearly emptied of life.

If measured by the number of lives it claimed, Katrina does not qualify as the worst disaster in our history. But it was far and away the most destructive disaster in our national experience when one considers the amount of damage it did not only to the physical and social landscapes of the Gulf region but also to the nation more generally. And it was far and away the most telling disaster in our national experience. Katrina stripped away the outer surface of our social structure and showed us what lies underneath—a grim look at race, class, and gender in these United States.

It is crucial to get this story straight so that we may learn from it and be ready for that stark inevitability, the next time. When seen through a social science lens, Katrina is almost the perfect storm in terms of informing us what the real human costs of a disaster are and helping prepare us for the blows that we know are lurking just over the horizon.

A number of studies of Katrina have appeared since the event. Most were brief glances at some fragment of that immense disaster rather than rich, in-depth portraits of it, and many rode the crest of Katrina's celebrity for the time it was in the news. The Katrina Bookshelf Series, by contrast, is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. The program itself was supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations, and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. This is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature. It is also a deeply human story being told here.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G) and the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation reached a settlement on August 20 requiring SCE&G to remove 240,000 tons of toxic coal ash from wet-storage impoundments near the Wateree River. The company must move the coal ash into lined landfill storage away from the river or have it recycled by December 31, 2020. The legal victory, secured with help from the Southern Environmental Law Center, is a major step forward in the protection of the river system, and could set a precedent for the handling of other dangerous coal ash-storage facilities in the state.

As we have reported in The Bulletin before, this summer's record-setting drought has wreaked havoc on farmers and ranchers across a broad swath of the United States. On Monday the United States Department of Agriculture announced that it would buy $170 million of pork, lamb, chicken, and catfish for federal food nutrition assistance programs, including food banks and school lunch and breakfast programs. This announcment is welcome news for farmers and ranchers across the affected area whose livlihoods are seriously endangered by the dry weather. While the Midwest has been hit hardest by this year's drought, farmers and ranchers in the US South (like the catfish farmer interviewed here) have also had to deal with rising feed costs and dry fields.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) there have been 693 cases (26 deaths) of the West Nile virus disease in humans in 43 states so far this year. This number represents the highest total in late August since the CDC started tracking the disease in 1999. Over 80 percent of the cases have been reported from six states (Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and California) and almost half of all cases have been reported from Texas (as illustrated in this map). The severity of the outbreak in and around Dallas, Texas has prompted the city to declare a state of emergency and deploy pesticides across the metro region via aircraft for the first time since 1966, much to the chagrin of many residents worried about the potentially hazardous side effects of the chemicals.